Sunday, March 12, 2017

Five Questions We Ask in the Dark, Part 2: Does God Exist?

I have to say: Our Old Testament reading
today kind of drives me crazy. More
specifically, it kind of makes me feel inadequate. This is the first time we meet one of the
central figures of the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions – Abram,
eventually to be renamed Abraham. This
account we heard today sounds like it just comes out of nowhere, and that’s
nearly true. The verses before it simply
introduce Abram and his wife, Sarai, as part of Abram’s extended family living in
what’s now southern Iraq. Abram’s father
takes his household on the road, intending to move them to Canaan, which is
modern Israel and Palestine. But they
only go part of the way, hiking up the Fertile Crescent and settling in what’s
now southern Turkey. That’s where we
pick up the short reading we heard this morning, when God spoke to Abram and said,
“Go from your father’s country and your kindred and your father’s house to the
land that I will show you. I will make
of you a great nation, and I will bless you…” (Genesis 12:1-2). That’s pretty much all Abram got. But based on this simple call, “Abram went,
as the Lord had told him.” (12:4)

Now, from this story, we know nothing about
what kind of a person Abram was. But I’m
pretty sure he wasn’t much like me, maybe not much like you, either. Whatever else might have been true about him,
Abram was willing – willing to walk into the darkness with his eyes wide
open. I can only imagine how much grief
he must have gotten from his family and the workers in his household. “You’ve got to be kidding, Abram. God has told you to leave everything you know
and wander to a foreign land? Really? You don’t even know the destination God has
in mind.” Abram is rightly held up as
the Scriptural exemplar of trust, staking his life on God’s direction. I know
I don’t measure up to that.

But then we have the Gospel reading, the
story of Nicodemus coming to Jesus at night for a conversation as deep as conversations
get. Nicodemus … now here’s someone I
can identify with. He’s a religious
elder, a Pharisee, a teacher, a leader of the people – someone who’s supposed
to have his stuff together. Nicodemus is
the man with all the answers. But this
night, Nicodemus is the man with all the questions. He comes to Jesus secretly and addresses him
as “Rabbi,” teacher. He knows about Jesus’
signs; he understands that Jesus is channeling God’s power. But how?
What’s going on here? Jesus tells
him no one can see God’s kingdom without being born anew, born from above; and
Nicodemus wants to know, “What does that mean?
How can you be born a second time?”
Well, Jesus waxes poetic about being born of both matter and spirit; he
says the wind blows where it will without you knowing where it comes from or
where it’s going, but still it happens.
“So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit” (John 3:8) – as if that explains anything. And Nicodemus is just as much in the dark as
he was before: “How can these things be?” (John 3:9) It’s tough to be the man with all the answers
when all you’ve got is questions.

But the night is a good time for questions
like this. I don’t know about you, but I
find myself lying awake in the wee small hours sometimes, trying to hear a
voice that doesn’t seem to have much to say.
I can name a few times when God has given me wonderfully direct messages,
promising to stand by me and guide me if I’ll take a journey sort of like Abram’s. That does happen – but it’s the 1 percent of
prayer. The other 99 percent is asking
questions in the dark; and, if you’re blessed enough to get an answer, chances
are it doesn’t make much sense. But
chances are even greater, in any given moment, that there’s no response at
all. And that’s scary. As Barbara Brown Taylor writes in Learning to Walk in the Dark, darkness
is frightening because it forces us to admit that we’re simply not in
control. And it’s all the more
frightening when we can’t sense God’s presence in it either. As she puts it, “One of the hardest things to
decide during a dark night is whether to surrender or resist. The choice often
comes down to what you believe about God and how God acts, which means that
every dark night of the soul involves wrestling with belief.”1

Ahhh, there it is … the question that lies
beneath all the others, the question we face in the dark but rarely ask out
loud. Does God exist? Is God really there? When I pray, am I just having a nice
conversation with myself? Plenty of
people, past and present, would say that’s exactly what I’m doing. Skeptical people sometimes look at people of
faith and wonder, “How in the world could you really buy into a relationship
with an invisible friend?” That’s not the
question Nicodemus raises with Jesus, but I think Nicodemus has much in common with
our skeptical hearts. Like Nicodemus, our
skeptical hearts actually want nothing more than to believe in something deeply. The interrogation Nicodemus gives Jesus comes
from longing, not a desire to play “gotcha.”
Nicodemus wants to believe, and he’s looking to Jesus to help him
understand: “How can these things be?” Jesus’
own mother, Mary, asked the same question of the angel who told her she would
be the mother of God. “How can this be?”
asks the skeptic today who sees his marriage failing, and who sees children across
town going hungry, and who sees women trafficked as slaves on American
highways, and who sees thousands of God’s children warehoused in prisons, and
who feels under siege by bitterness and intolerance both inside and outside our
nation. And our own skeptical hearts
join the chorus: “How can you believe your invisible friend is really there?”

In a few days, our friend Fr. Marcus will
be walking in Abram’s footsteps. Today
is his last Sunday with us, after three and a half years as part of this parish
family. It’s fitting that we’re in this
sermon series as he concludes his time with us, because Fr. Marcus has asked
questions we likely wouldn’t have considered otherwise, questions we tend to
leave in the dark. He’s also built
relationships with newcomers, and prayed with kids on ski slopes, and told holy
stories in Children’s Chapel, and retrained himself from swinging incense every
Sunday of the year. Now, Fr. Marcus is
heeding God’s call to the frozen north, a distant land far from his “country
and [his] kindred and [his] father’s house.”
Unlike Abram, at least Marcus has an address; but he doesn’t really know
much of anything about what life will be like in this new land that God will
show him. And still he goes, with our
blessing and into the blessing God has in store – both for him and through him
for the people God loves.

But you know, Fr. Marcus isn’t the only
one walking in Abram’s footsteps. So is
Mtr. Anne. Later this summer, she will
journey on sabbatical and return to us a different role. Another one walking in Abram’s footsteps is
the priest whom God will bring here to minister with younger adults, families,
and the community around us. This
summer, God willing, he or she will come into this parish family, having left
another land and kindred behind. And honestly,
so am I walking in Abram’s footsteps. A
church’s life is always changing, right out from under you it sometimes seems;
and this summer, we’ll be taking down HJ’s and putting a newer, more efficient
building in its place to support ministries we’re now building and continuing
to grow.

The truth is, we’re all Abram’s
children. None of us knows what tomorrow
will bring, much less the years to come.
We spend our days planning for that which we imagine but cannot
see. Eighteen years ago, I went to
seminary with a little savings in my pocket and a pretty decent plan: My wife, Ann, would work full time to support
us and our two little kids. But I left
seminary with a wife who’d nearly died of lupus and was disabled and on
chemotherapy. Oh, yeah, we also left
with a mountain of debt. Nice work by
that invisible friend, I hear the skeptic say.

Here’s the thing: I know
God is there. Ann is healthier now than
she’s ever been since the fall she nearly died.
That mountain of debt is a thing of the past. I find myself in this beautiful place with you
beautiful and broken people, striving to hear and follow God’s call together as
best we can. Many of us could tell a
story like that. So here’s how I came to know that God is there: Because after asking all the questions, after stumbling
in the dark, after feeling sorry for myself, after demanding to know the
destination – at the end of it all, I took the risk to trust.

When we hear that story of Abram setting
out for an unknown land, and when St. Paul writes about Abram’s faith, we’re
not hearing about someone who just believes something. The answers that come in the dark are not verifications
of intellectual propositions. The final answer
that comes in the dark is to trust – to make the choice to stake our hope and
our lives on “the assurance of things not seen,” as the Letter to the Hebrews
puts it (11:1). We begin as Nicodemus,
interrogating Jesus to make sense of God’s ways. We stand there with Nicodemus, trying to fit vast
truth into our intellectual boxes. We
hear Jesus mumbling mystery; and with Nicodemus, we cry in the dark, “How can
these things be?!” (John 3:9).

But you know, at the end of John’s Gospel,
Nicodemus comes to Jesus again. This
time, he’s not asking questions. This
time, he’s putting his own life on the line in the darkest moment of them all,
as Jesus’ dead body is taken down from the cross. Nicodemus shows up, with Joseph of Arimathea,
to take the body away for burial, despite the risk that the Romans might kill
him, too. And to prepare the body,
Nicodemus brings with him “a mixture of myrrh and aloes, weighing about a
hundred pounds” (John 19:39) – tremendously
more ointment and burial spice than he needs to do the job. Now, maybe Nicodemus was just trying to
ensure that his failed leader’s body didn’t stink. But I choose a different interpretation. I see Nicodemus investing everything he’s got
in something even less reliable than
an invisible friend. I see Nicodemus investing
all his trust in the man lying dead before him and the divine Spirit that will
blow through that body three days later.
For, as the apostle Paul writes, God “gives life to the dead and calls
into existence the things that do not exist” (Romans 4:17).

On the world’s terms, this is no way to
live. But for Abram, for Marcus, for
Anne, for our next priest, for me, for you – it’s the only way to live. As Barbara
Brown Taylor writes, “To be human is to live by sunlight and moonlight, with
anxiety and delight, admitting limits and transcending them, falling down and
rising up. To want a life with only half
of these things in it is to want half a life.”2 So, to Fr. Marcus, and to Mtr. Anne, and to
all of us who invest our hearts in whispers we hear in the shadows, let me
say: Keep staking your life on the
presence and power of the living God – the God who “gives life to the dead and
calls into existence the things that do not exist.” For glorious things await us as we walk in
the dark.